Tuesday, June 10, 2014

If your heart is your home, then feelings are visitors. Sometimes their presence is expected, and other times they would pay you a surprise visit, but the question lies ... for how long? Most of the time, your heart will be welcoming their arrival with open arms.Some feelings would drop by only for a mere moment, others stay a little bit longer, and if you're unlucky, certain feelings will even permanently reside in the deepest core of your soul - overstaying their welcome, eventually taking up the space you have been saving for something life-changing and meaningful. They will consume everything you have and change everything that you are, and they will be the part of you that you never knew you needed. They will be that missing puzzle piece in your life that completes you in such a way that you can no longer imagine living life before them.

And that is it, you're screwed. If the analogy is true, there is no eliminating the feelings that grow from within you, after all, how rude would it be to simply kick out a guest who pays you a visit? Even if you do, you would ruin everything you've had with this visitor especially if things do not end on good terms. Nothing good ever comes from trying to abruptly snap yourself out of a feeling that has gotten so strong.

Yes, you might have that false sense of freedom once you feel as though you have completely eliminated unnecessary emotional baggage with such haste, but how sure are you that they won't recur?

Some say feelings that return are feelings that never left the first place, otherwise they would have just been temporary, like perhaps a crush you had on your classmate in high school. You were so infatuated back in the days, you felt as though it was the real deal and that it would have been impossible to get over them - then again, you eventually did.

Then comes that person from college who drove you equally crazy and beyond, whom you have mistaken for yet another infatuation. You thought the feelings would be gone the second you hold that roll of diploma in your hands, and you could think of nothing but starting your new career life as you flung that mortar board in mid-air. You thought you would have a one-track mind again just because you will no longer see that object of affection. Wrong.

What happens when you suddenly see this person again in a different phase of your life? Perhaps you end up working under the same organization, or worst still, you bump into them while they are on a vacation with their family - now happily married while you are still trying to figure out your life? Will you be able to leave the past behind and stay on platonic grounds with them? Or will you find yourself trying very hard to keep a straight face, lying to yourself that you are happy for them while in truth you are crumbling from the inside; stuffing your face with half your weight's worth of ice cream later that night in your hotel room alone to drown your sorrows? If you find yourself reacting similarly to the latter, you're a goner.

Your feelings have evolved into something so colossal, that it is now overpowering you. It wasn't "just a crush" after all, it's love! Very agonizing, isn't it? Especially with the fact that there is absolutely nothing you can do to stop it. After all these years, you thought you were finally over them, and then something shows up to prove you wrong.

Sometimes, the most trivial of things from your surroundings can be a trigger that brings back memories from the past, making your old scars bleed again. As much as you want to forget something or someone, sometimes there are just no effective way to do it. It can be a song that takes you back to a timeline when you were so smitten by a particular person, it was as if there was no tomorrow. There was only now, you lived in the moment and you wished it would never have to end ; once you return to the current reality, you feel ashamed of yourself for living in the past.

"Live in the moment, because when time has passed, it will never return." A piece of advice repeated but a broken record, nevertheless often subconsciously ignored anyway because people tend to hold on to the past so firmly that they tend to take the present time for granted, and at times they tend to forget that there is still a future ahead of them. Why? Simply because the future is scary and uncertain, while the past is so well-defined, much like a comfort zone to return to whenever things get messed up in the present. This is why it is so hard to move on.

So if we are not supposed to force ourselves to stop our own feelings, what are we to do? Ironically enough, the cliche' "Time heals" applies here, regardless of how overrated the relative concept of time is.There are just certain problems in life that you can never find a solution to, so you ought to resort to waiting instead. As pathetic as it may sound, you have to know when to stop pushing. Treat your feelings like your visitors, let them naturally come and go as they please.

There comes a moment in life where you just have to buckle up and sit back ; let the universe take its own course and just enjoy the ride. What happens next? Time will tell. Let destiny surprise you. For all you know, you're heading for the ride of your life.